Marky Ramone says The Ramones weren't really brothers, but fought like them

Ask Marky Ramone, drummer for punk rock's founding fathers The Ramones for 15 years and the last surviving member of its classic lineup, to reveal the biggest surprise in his new autobiography, and he laughingly says, "That we weren't real brothers."

That's true. None of The Ramones were brothers; in fact, none of The Ramones was a Ramone. The band used the surname because Paul McCartney used it as a pseudonym when he checked into hotels with The Beatles. Marky Ramone, for example, was born Marc Bell.

But the book, "Punk Rock Blitzkrieg: My Life as a Ramone" (released Jan. 13, Touchstone, $28, 403 pp.), in many ways portrays the band members as brothers pursuing a common musical goal, tapping into each others' creativity, suffering together through rough times.

And, especially, feuding.

Marky, 62, likely will touch on much of that when he sits for an informal chat and signing to promote the book at 7 p.m. Jan. 30 at Bethlehem Public Library.

"Well, we were brothers," he says in a phone call from his home in the Brooklyn Heights section of New York, explaining those personal rifts.

The schisms were so intense, Marky writes, that for most of The Ramones' existence, guitarist Johnny and singer Joey never spoke and rode at opposite ends of the band's van. Marky got his job in the band because founding drummer Tommy felt so picked on and pressured that he quit to manage the band rather than tour with it.

"I was the newer guy and I knew each individual so well that I knew what I could do, hopefully, to get them all together," Marky says. "You know, in life, some people just don't get along. But I got along with all of them."

Despite the friction, or because of it, The Ramones were able to turn the world of music upside down. In the mid-1970s, the four members (including bassist Dee Dee) from Queens, N.Y., rebelled against over-bloated corporate rock with straight-forward, blazing-fast songs about subversive topics such as Nazis, sniffing glue and pinheads.

It inspired a whole new genre of bands such as The Sex Pistols and The Clash. Its songs "Judy is a Punk" and "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" even gave a name to the movement.

The title of Marky's book refers the band's first single, 1976's "Blitzkrieg Bop." The song never charted, but nearly 40 years later, its "Hey, Ho, Let's Go!" chant is still used in popular culture.

During The Ramones' 22 years together, it produced 14 albums of original material, four live discs and three compilations. It played Allentown seven times, all with Marky as drummer, according to an online tour database.

Marky joined The Ramones in 1978 for the recording of the band's fourth album, "Rocket to Russia," after having played in proto-punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids.

Despite the professed brotherly love for The Ramones' other members, Marky writes critically about each of them.

He says Joey's obsessive-compulsive disorder was so oppressive that frequently he made the band late because of his rituals. He once had a road manager drive him from Queens back to the airport just so he could satisfy his obsession to repeatedly kick a curb. Later, Marky says, Joey got into drug use.

In perhaps the book's real biggest surprise, he says Joey had a huge scar from the removal of a conjoined twin.

Marky says Dee Dee's drug use was so profuse that he was rushed to the hospital to have his stomach pumped on the set of the group's breakthrough 1979 movie "Rock 'n' Roll High School" after gobbling pills thrown by fans. On a European tour, he had the bus driver stop so he could bury drugs along the way to retrieve later.

But Marky holds out the most criticism for Johnny, who he says ran the band with a tight fist both in control and finances, was an overbearing political reactionary and was mean-spirited, to boot. Marky writes that he once slapped a girlfriend of Joey and stole another, who became his wife, Linda.

"I was hoping toward the end that Johnny and Joey would make up, but never happened, unfortunately," Marky says.

He says he has no contact with C.J. Ramone, who replaced Dee Dee 1989-96. The book has muted criticism for the bass player, saying he wasn't that good and became a sycophant for Johnny Ramone.

"You know, some people get along, some people don't," Marky says. "I really got along with Dee Dee. And CJ … the band was already together for 15 years, so he wasn't really there at [the iconic New York punk club] CBGB's scene when it started. But he did some good things, and it was very hard to fill Dee Dee Ramone's shoes."

Marky is equally critical of himself in the book.

"I was no angel, either," he says. "And my old man, he told me, 'When you write this book and you're going to write about your other bandmates, you'd better make sure you write about your own personality and be honest and truthful about that, too.' So I did."

Marky writes openly how his struggles with alcohol finally got him kicked out of The Ramones in 1982 after he caused the band to miss a show. But he says that even when Joey delivered the call, it was brotherly.

"You can't be in the band anymore," he recalls Joey saying. "I feel bad about it, but there's nothing I can do."

The book chronicles Marky's two stints in rehab after he drunkenly crashed a car into a store, and how he was working his way back as a bicycle messenger in New York when the band asked him to return in 1987. His replacement, Richie Ramone, had quit in a dispute over royalties.

"They asked me back in the band twice," Marky says. "So I was very grateful for that phone call because who knows what could have happened if that hadn't happened. I don't mind revealing my situation with that, because if it could help somebody and they read the book and see what I did, maybe that's a really good thing."

The band retired after a farewell tour in 1996. In the next eight years, three of the other members from its classic lineups died.

Joey died of cancer in 2001, shortly before the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Dee Dee died of a drug overdose three months after the induction in 2002. Johnny died, also of cancer, in 2004. Tommy died from cancer in July 2014. He never made it to a scheduled 2013 date at Crocodile Rock in Allentown.

Marky largely avoids discussion of Richie in the book, and in conversation he refers to him as "Richard Reinhardt, the drummer."

Asked whether he gets royalties from The Ramones, Marky says he indeed does — it was part of his contract both times he joined.

That, he says, should answer any criticism that he wrote the book simply to cash in on The Ramones. Or that money is the reason he plays with Marky Ramone's Blitzkrieg, a band that for 10 years has toured playing Ramones songs (it played at Stroudsburg's Sherman Theater in 2012).

He says his motivation for the band is "to keep the music alive ... Because there is a whole new generation, and along with the older generation you see them in the audience. It's great that The Ramones can definitely bridge that gap and everyone just gets together and has a great time."

Asked why The Ramones were so influential, Marky cites the band's loopy lyrical content and its energy, both of which he says appealed to youth.

"The rapid succession of the songs on our live set into each song — there were no breaks, there was no time to talk. We just went on — 'one, two, three, four' — into each song, and that's what created a lot of the excitement and energy of the group."

Lyrical topics such as pinheads, shock treatments and lobotomies "definitely weren't sung about at the time," he says with a laugh. "We thought at the time that it was humorous and funny and that we could construct a two-minute song and put it on an album."

But he says that innovation also was why The Ramones spent years without commercial success.

"We were so new," he says. "When that first album came out, nobody heard music like that before. The competition was disco and stadium rock, so a lot of DJs at the time just didn't want to play us.

"And, of course, the term 'punk,' the word 'punk,' turned a lot of people off because they thought we were a bunch of crazy rebels. So we were kind of pushed aside.

"But now, what I've observed the past 15 years, the songs are played everywhere, all over the world. And, you know, better late than never."